Grow Your Brand with LinkedIn’s Employee Advocacy Feature
LinkedIn gives companies the opportunity to recommend content to employees to post on their profiles in an effort to expand your brand’s reach. Learn about the benefits of using their Employee Advocacy feature and making the most of your most important resource: your employees.
Before Linkedin’s Employee Advocacy feature was introduced in 2021, LinkedIn used a tool called “Elevate,” that allowed employees to “combine algorithmic recommendations from LinkedIn Pulse and Newsle, and human curation, to equip employees with a ready stream of relevant content they could share.” While Elevate was a helpful mechanism that allowed organizations to share news and post ideas among employees, its new replacement, the Employee Advocacy feature, streamlines the process and makes suggesting content to employees easier than ever.
Since LinkedIn hasn’t done a whole lot of promotion on their (relatively) new feature, we thought we’d dive in and explore the benefits for all sorts of brands, big and small.
According to LinkedIn data, employees are 60% more likely to engage with posts from coworkers, and 14x more likely to share their organization’s content while utilizing the My Company tab and its features rather than creating their own. Having engaged employees leads to approximately 8x more page views, 4x more page followers, 7x more job views and 4x more job applications. The benefits are numerous–but how does it all work?
Adding to the Post Bank
Creating or adding content to the Employee Advocacy feature is done through the company admin menu. The “My Company” menu item will expand as a drop-down menu with “Recommend to Employees” and “Content Suggestions.”
Content Suggestions
Content suggestions are exactly what they sound like: LinkedIn curates a list of trending articles based on your industry and content, Employee Milestones (such as welcome posts or congratulatory posts like promotions or retirements), and Company News that would be added as a company article or newsletter. These can be then added to the “post bank” or posted directly to the company’s page.
Recommend to Employees
This is the main feature of the Employee Advocacy tool. Through Recommend to Employees in the Content menu item, an admin can add in text, photos, videos, or documents that will be available for employees to share to their connections.
Adding items to this post bank is essentially the same thing as creating a post on Linkedin. When you click on the “Recommend to employees” field at the top of the page, it’s the same process as creating an organic social post; the only difference being instead of “post,” as the last button you click, it’s labeled as “recommend.” The post will then be added to the available pool of posts for your employees.
For that reason, it is advised to send out an email about this new feature to your employees (linkedin even has a template available) and it might be a good idea to send periodic reminders that there are posts active and available to employees. Incentivization helps - running an employee contest, such as “most employee posts from recommendations,” or “best statistics in Q1” gets a gift card or bonus. Just make sure to keep posts fresh and timely so your employees can share trending and timely information with their connections.
As we outlined earlier, this feature will increase your company profile’s reach and benefit not only your brand, but individual employees by increasing thought leadership and platform presence. This increases transparency and authenticity, and creates a system to develop employee profiles and boost engagement.
There, employees will see all of the posts admins have created, posts from co-workers, and links to coworkers’ profiles that they haven’t yet connected with. The next step is simple - just click “start a post” on the content they’d like to use and make edits to the post or simply click “post,” and they’re done. The post has now been shared to their profile from the company’s page and will reach their connections.
Analytics are accessible in three different forms. You can see a snapshot from the last 30 days on the “Recommend for Employees” page where the post recommendations go. By clicking on the snapshot, you’ll gain access to the full analytics page. This page can also be reached by clicking on Analytics in the Admin menu and selecting the “Employee Advocacy” tab from the drop-down menu.
From the Analytics page, you’ll have access to:
Comparative data (month-to-month) is available, and LinkedIn gives you the option to export that data for reporting purposes. We’ve put this into effect for several of our clients and have already seen the benefits after a short time.
The Employee Advocacy feature gives organizations a way to share their information through their most important resource: their employees. Establishing a bank of posts and sharing what is available to employees to share with their connections will increase growth not only for the brand, but for the individual employees as well. Getting the name of your company in front of as many people as possible can lead to increased sales, higher visibility, and endows trust. If your company needs help making the most of your LinkedIn profile, get in touch with our content team and let’s talk about your goals.
Before Linkedin’s Employee Advocacy feature was introduced in 2021, LinkedIn used a tool called “Elevate,” that allowed employees to “combine algorithmic recommendations from LinkedIn Pulse and Newsle, and human curation, to equip employees with a ready stream of relevant content they could share.” While Elevate was a helpful mechanism that allowed organizations to share news and post ideas among employees, its new replacement, the Employee Advocacy feature, streamlines the process and makes suggesting content to employees easier than ever.
Since LinkedIn hasn’t done a whole lot of promotion on their (relatively) new feature, we thought we’d dive in and explore the benefits for all sorts of brands, big and small.
What’s This All About?
Linkedin’s Employee Advocacy feature allows company page admins (Super Admins, Content Admins, and Curators) to add posts, photos or graphics, videos, or documents to an available bank of posts that can be reshared by employees of the company. Do you have exciting news you want your employees to share? Have you created a new resource you want to promote? Do you have an upcoming event you need to tell others about? Enter Linkedin’s Employee Advocacy.According to LinkedIn data, employees are 60% more likely to engage with posts from coworkers, and 14x more likely to share their organization’s content while utilizing the My Company tab and its features rather than creating their own. Having engaged employees leads to approximately 8x more page views, 4x more page followers, 7x more job views and 4x more job applications. The benefits are numerous–but how does it all work?
Adding to the Post Bank
Creating or adding content to the Employee Advocacy feature is done through the company admin menu. The “My Company” menu item will expand as a drop-down menu with “Recommend to Employees” and “Content Suggestions.”
Content Suggestions
Content suggestions are exactly what they sound like: LinkedIn curates a list of trending articles based on your industry and content, Employee Milestones (such as welcome posts or congratulatory posts like promotions or retirements), and Company News that would be added as a company article or newsletter. These can be then added to the “post bank” or posted directly to the company’s page.
Recommend to Employees
This is the main feature of the Employee Advocacy tool. Through Recommend to Employees in the Content menu item, an admin can add in text, photos, videos, or documents that will be available for employees to share to their connections.
Adding items to this post bank is essentially the same thing as creating a post on Linkedin. When you click on the “Recommend to employees” field at the top of the page, it’s the same process as creating an organic social post; the only difference being instead of “post,” as the last button you click, it’s labeled as “recommend.” The post will then be added to the available pool of posts for your employees.
Spread the News
Employees are not made aware of posts that are added to recommendations. Admins can add as many posts as they want to the feature, but unless your company has intuitive employees or you explicitly share this information with them internally, it’s unlikely you’ll see any action here.For that reason, it is advised to send out an email about this new feature to your employees (linkedin even has a template available) and it might be a good idea to send periodic reminders that there are posts active and available to employees. Incentivization helps - running an employee contest, such as “most employee posts from recommendations,” or “best statistics in Q1” gets a gift card or bonus. Just make sure to keep posts fresh and timely so your employees can share trending and timely information with their connections.
As we outlined earlier, this feature will increase your company profile’s reach and benefit not only your brand, but individual employees by increasing thought leadership and platform presence. This increases transparency and authenticity, and creates a system to develop employee profiles and boost engagement.
How to Post
Employees will need to have made the connection between their profile and the company page to access these posts - in most cases, that will have already been done. Once that’s been established, the posts that admins create for their employees are accessible from the company’s LinkedIn profile, through the “My Company” tab in the menu.There, employees will see all of the posts admins have created, posts from co-workers, and links to coworkers’ profiles that they haven’t yet connected with. The next step is simple - just click “start a post” on the content they’d like to use and make edits to the post or simply click “post,” and they’re done. The post has now been shared to their profile from the company’s page and will reach their connections.
The Value
We already outlined the benefits of using the Employee Advocacy feature, but the analytics that come with it really hammer things home.Analytics are accessible in three different forms. You can see a snapshot from the last 30 days on the “Recommend for Employees” page where the post recommendations go. By clicking on the snapshot, you’ll gain access to the full analytics page. This page can also be reached by clicking on Analytics in the Admin menu and selecting the “Employee Advocacy” tab from the drop-down menu.
From the Analytics page, you’ll have access to:
- Recommendations - number of posts that were added to the post bank
- Posts from recommendations - number of posts that were created by employees from the available recommendations
- Reactions to posts - number of reactions to posts that were created
- Comments on posts - number of comments on posts that were created
- Reshares of posts - number of reshares from the posts that were created
Comparative data (month-to-month) is available, and LinkedIn gives you the option to export that data for reporting purposes. We’ve put this into effect for several of our clients and have already seen the benefits after a short time.